What's the Harm, It's Just Good Clean Violence

How much more evidence do we need that ours is a dysfunctional society? I don't know if you saw the Super Bowl ad in question, but to me it was downright shocking, a series of grown people in all walks of life smacking each other on the face, like, "hey, this is fun, let's hit each other just for the heck of it." As if football itself isn't already an invitation to crude, physically devestating brutality. And it wasn't just this one commercial, they all in one way or another were designed to shock us with sociopathic behavior. The kicker came this week, when activist groups protested the ads and the sponsors reacted with varying degrees of contrition. It's become a game in itself, we'll broadcast something really outrageous, you complain, and we'll claim we're going to rethink our advertising policy. "Our bad." Meanwhile, the ads resonated all week long, they didn't go away, the media kept hyping the invented "controversy." Then later this week Anna Nicole Smith died and the media went bonkers, dedicating hours and hours, and pages and pages, of "news" coverage to the sad, sordid, lonely death of an untalented stripper, gold-digger, erstwhile Playboy centerfold who had absolutely nothing to give to the culture but sex. Not even interesting, alluring sex, but a bloated, desperately needy parody of sex. All the while, not that anyone really noticed, the death and disintegration continued its downward spiral in Iraq while conservative lawmakers and talk show bullies worked themselves up into a frothing frenzy because Nancy Pelosi was using a jet assigned her by the Pentagon to get her back and forth to her home in California, a jet they considered too big for her because it didn't have to stop for refueling. By the way, I wonder if there's an acceptable reason to "slug gramps?"